metareviews & literature reviews can serve the same functions

it's quite reasonable to have a policy not to cite an original source without a literature review attached

> metareviews & literature reviews can serve the same functions

these are not the same functions.

Peer review is a recent development in science that has slowed scientific progress immensly, as well as making all papers read for reviewers and not actually be understandable for other people to read them. If you've ever seen a scientific paper before peer review, you can see that they were actually made to be understandable (unlike papers today). There's a reason Einstein hated peer review. Peer review is an experiment on the scientific method, one that has failed spectacularly.

Anyone who wants their paper to be understood by a non-expert audience can write a blog post explaining the work. Here’s a great example [1]. Papers have become more intricate and technical because science has become more intricate and technical, in some cases because we found subtle errors and exceptions in the more casual early papers!

[1] https://thegradient.pub/othello/